Good Morning!
On this day in 1776 Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John that women were “determined to foment a rebellion” if the new Declaration of Independence failed to guarantee their rights.
In 1831 Quebec and Montreal were incorporated as cities.
In 1870, in Perth Amboy, NJ, Thomas Munday Peterson became the first black to vote in the U.S.
In 1889, in Paris, the Eiffel Tower officially opened.
In 1933 Congress authorized the Civilian Conservation Corps to relieve rampant unemployment.
And in 1958 the U.S. Navy formed the atomic submarine division.
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Quote of the Day
“The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit will lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”
Edward Fitzgerald
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/edward_fitzgerald.html#y7YtwodE7gWavxEU.99
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Today is Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthday.
And it’s also Lefty (William Orville) Frizzell’s.
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Wandering Views 
Yesterday morning we were watching Sunday Morning. They had a segment about President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Now on the one had I am sure it was spun a little to make him sound better, but it struck me that he may have been the only President who could have pushed through all the Civil Rights Legislation that he did. He was Southern. If it had been pushed through by anyone other than a Southerner there would have been even more resistance.
I am looking at this as History, not something I lived through.
My question today is take Vietnam out of the equation, what do you think of LBJ? Do you think he was the right man at the right time for Civil Rights?
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that’s a difficult question and I don’t think that I am up to answering it.
got complimented today in the weight room by a very fit fellow who noticed that I had done 20 situps. He gave us our overview of the weight room, so knows that I could only do 2 when I started.
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I did live through the civil rights movement in the South. I remember that Johnson was not well liked but was not hated like Kennedy. Kennedy was seen as a rich know-it-all Yankee and Johnson was considered at least more down to earth.
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AJ, that is literally a very touching picture! Sweet!
Kim, that is a heavy question for early in the morning. Since God places or allows men to attain high office and since his presidency coincided with what was going on with civil rights, I assume God thought he was the right man to help with that battle.
Lady Bird is known for her wildflower beautification efforts. Was she a flower child?
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Of course, this was from the perspective of a kid listening to the adults around her. One of my Dad’s friends joked that funeral took up so much of his TV that he almost wished Kennedy hadn’t been shot.
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Kim, I would give more ddpth to my answer, but I am low on knowledge of historical data. I think your question deserves research for a more tjorough answer. Probably Michelle can answer in the depth that you hoped for when you posed the question. She is gifted in that area.
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AJ, is Mouse a Maine Coon cat? I saw something on a web posting aboug the M marking that made me wonder.
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I lived through the Johnson years. Kim is correct about civil rights. He expedited it, though it was coming anyhow. It was MLK that did it through his peaceful protests. the worst thing about Johnson was that he was effective. He started the Johnson war on poverty through the New Frontier. War on poverty. Medicare. Appalachian project. ( I knew what was happening with that when lots of people from Southwest Virginia came to Washington to get jobs. It helped people in the Appalachians improve themselves, but they left the area.)
Johnson started the Vietnam War. There were token troops in S. Vietnam during the Eisenhower years, but Johnson staged the Turner Joy attack. It never happened.
Imagine the damage that would have been done if Jimmy Carter were as smart and effective as Johnson?
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I have a book we studied at the NWC, called The War Managers, about how we mismanaged the Vietnam War instead of fighting it.
Do you realize that American troops never lost a single encounter with the enemy?
The Tet Offensive was disastrous for them militarily, but a propaganda victory because the MSM was on the enemy’s side.
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Interesting question to begin the day. We had a set of World Book Encyclopedia and I used to read (among other things) the entries for the presidents. J and K were in the same volume so I read about Kennedy and Johnson close together. Kennedy captured my attention more than Johnson, who I only remembered for the unusual name of his wife and for being the vice president when Kennedy was shot. I put him down as one of the boring presidents.
Now however, my answer to Kim’s question would be another question – civil rights for whom? Johnson will go down in my books as the president who began the aid for population control foreign policy of the US (Eisenhower had toyed with the idea, but Kennedy, as a Catholic, refused to consider it). In 1966, Indira Ghandi asked for aid for a famine in India. Johnson’s reply? He was not going to “piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.” He forced Ghandi to agree to population control quotas in return for food aid:
“In accordance with the agreement, sterilization and IUD-insertion quotas were set for each Indian state… Every hospital in the country had a large portion of its facilities commandeered for sterilization… hundreds of sterilization camps were set up in rural areas… operated by paramedical personnel who had as little as two days of training. Minimum quotas were set for the state-salaried cam medics-they has to perform 150 vasectomies or 300 IUD insertions per month each, or their pay would be docked…
…When these pittances did not induce enough subjects to meet the quotas, some states adopted additional “incentives: Madhya Pradesh, for example, denied irrigation water to villages that failed to meet their quotas. Faced with starvation, millions of impoverished people had no alternative but to submit to sterilization. As the forms of coercion employed worked most effectively on the poorest, the system also provided the eugenic bonus of doing away preferentially with untouchables.” [From Merchants of Despair]
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Good points, Chas and Roscuro. Then that brings up another question. Do you think Johnson had those requirements from his own sense of wanting to control things in the world or was it because he knew Congress and the American people would not go with blanket give-a-ways without some sense of control attached?
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I always thought Lefty Frizzelle played his guitar the other way. At the beginning, you can see Buck Trent on the backup guitar. Buck was big on Hee Haw. Lefty was never one of my favorites. Porter Waggoner gave Dolly her chance, and she took it.
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Janice, you should read the book. It is pointed out that Johnson could have asked for India to take sides in the Cold War (it was neutral) or asked for support for the conflict that was gearing up in Vietnam. An aide, Joseph Califano, suggested that very thing to Johnson, who demanded to know if he, Califano, was “out of your [profanity] mind?” Johnson was one of many elite Westerners (the US led the funding of such eugenics programs through USAID) who believed that third world population booms were a threat, politically and economically.
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Janice,
I don’t know. Her mother wasn’t, but daddy’s lineage is unknown, so it’s possible.
And the ducks make a lovely heart shape with there heads like that. I didn’t notice it when I took it but saw it once I looked at them on the computer.
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Population control was not a big thing to the public during those years.
It was:
The war
Racial unrest.
the ME generation with rock and drugs.
An attitude of irresponsibility everywhere.
Nixon could have changed that, but he was caught up in Watergate, which was, in fact, nothing. However, the media made it big, just as they are quiet about Benghazi and IRS and Obomacare, etc.
The media and McNamara lost the Viet Nam war. Having said that, there was no way it could have a good outcome because the South Vietnam government was as corrupt as the Afghan government is now.
You can’t export democracy.
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Johnson was a nasty character. I was too little to make an opinion as a child but Robert Caro’s masterful 3-book biography made it clear Johnson was unethical, vicious and a total power broker.
That may explain some of the foment of those times: a leader looking for political points who grew up poor on an impoverish farm.
That’s all I have time for now.
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I agree with Anonymous. Uncouth, profane, more than a little rough around the edges. Not a very thoughtful president, an old-school wheeler-and-dealer politician (who provided important political connections to help Kennedy get elected). In terms of personal and leadership style, he was almost the anti-Kennedy.
But his political finesse was important in the passage of the civil rights legislation, something most observers said Kennedy would never have been able to do.
I doubt that he’d have been re-elected with the mess that Vietnam had become by 1968, although Humphrey, who also was hawkish on the war, came very close to winning that election.
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A duck couple. 🙂 Sweet.
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Johnson and Kennedy didn’t like each other. Bordered on hatred.
Johnson was always offended by the “swellness” of the Kennedys.
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I had not thought of this before but perhaps Johnson is the President that Obama is most like. I somehow have the same sensr of “ruthless” about them both that I don’t have about the others. But I think Lady Bird was probably a good woman.
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Sweet ducky love 🙂 Great photo to start the day!! It’s terribly windy here today…and was last night….70mph wind gusts at the Air Force Academy…don’t like the wind…no…not one bit! Our fake owl with a rotating head to scare off the woodpeckers was knocked over…he lost his head…now I have to figure out how to fix his head so that it moves again! Pesky woodpeckers!
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The best that resulted from Nixon’s Watergate was Chuck Colson’s conversion and all the organizations that birthed.
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I just found out that the book I just finished, ARooster Once Crowed, is free for Kindle on Amazon. It is a great book to read for the Easter season. I need to get my review posted.
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Kim, I saw the end of that segment of Sunday Morning and also found it interesting. Your idea that he may have been the only president who could have passed civil rights legislation at the time reminds me of the saying, “Only Nixon could go to China.”
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Chas, I remember some of the hippy types calling for population control.
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Karen O,
I received your email, but the link didn’t come thru. Could you resend it please?
Thank you! 🙂
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KBells,
Thanks Hippies. 🙄
Speaking as someone who came after the hippies, I have to say those types are responsible for a lot of what’s wrong today. What they became is way worse than what they were.
I’m not a fan. 😦
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Jacqueline always referred to Johnson as Colonel Cornpone
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Kevin, I believe that was an old Vulcan proverb. 🙂
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Opening Day(s) is upon us. 🙂
I like that, but the Yankees don’t start until tomorrow in Houston, then onto Toronto. The home opener isn’t until next week.
That’s when they’ll take 2/3 from the O’s. 🙂
Then, bring on the Red (spits) Sox. 🙂
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Oh, you’re going to give us a game?
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Hippies and their sin all goes back to the Garden of Eden.
The mom I mentioned on the prayer thread who was around my age called herself, “a child of the sixties.” She made it sound like I had really missed out by not doing drugs back then and although she never offered any I got the impression that she was encouaging me even as a parent of a young child to get with it an see what I had missed out on. I wasn’t buying it. As it turned out, it worked out well that she did not believe in spanking her three-year-old son and I did believe in (non-abusive) spanking of mine. So I had good reason to not keep her son. She put him in day care and went to work thus pretty effectively ending our get togethers. God is good.
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Linda,
Yes. Everybody gets one. 🙂
2/3 is the name of the game. A season full of those is how championships are won. 🙂
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6 Arrows, I look forward to playing your You Tube for Bosley. I decided to put on an old CD, “Nights in Viena,” while I worked in the kitchen. Being a nocturnal creature, the classical music seemed to help her be more settled than she is sometimes. She likes classical! 🙂
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A game in Toronto? Maybe Mike will get a chance to see them. 🙂
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Linda,
Don’t worry, I’ll be routing for you guys later today. 🙂
Then again, I do that for anyone playing the Sox. 🙂
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A classical kitty — cool! Yay, Bosley! 🙂
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Babysat for several hours this morning, while Emily was working with Lee. Will be babysitting for several more hours in just a bit, when Emily leaves for school.
R is supposed to have Forrest from 10a.m. today until 10a.m. tomorrow (when he is supposed to drop him off to Emily at StoryTime at the library).
Here’s what I wrote (well, typed) in my log…
Monday, March 31
(10a.m., Ryan to pick-up Forrest, to 10a.m. Thurs., Ryan to drop off Forrest at Stafford Library, meeting Emily there, for StoryTime)
(On Sunday, Ryan indicated he would be late picking up Forrest Monday morning.)
Ryan did not pick up Forrest in the morning. Responding to Emily’s text asking when he would pick him up, Ryan said he had things to do, & would pick him up when he got around to it.
He said he would call her back in “a bit”.
At approx. 3:20, Ryan called, refusing to pick up Forrest, saying it’s “not fair” that he has to provide transportation both ways (this one time each week). (It was conveniently too late for Emily to drop off Forrest & get to class on time this evening.)
Emily reminded him that he agreed to & signed off on this agreement at court. It didn’t change his mind.
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Not that anyone’s keeping score, but if you were, that would be that out of 6 times so far that he was supposed to have Forrest, he has had him twice.
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Is there a way to secure those texts he sends? ( I am technically dumb!) For the judge to see the texts in R’s own words I would think would have greater impact on future decisions. So sorry this is happening Karen…continuing prayers
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I hope someone listens to Emily’s side of this. It is so hard on the little ones to be waiting for a parent who never shows up. I hope you can keep a lot of that from him.
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I took BG to the doctor this afternoon. We went and had chips and salsa at local restaurant then went downtown and walked around a bit. I got. Chance to tell her my contribution to her car. She complained about her dad some. I told her I lived her and the door was always open.
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Kim, sounds like you did a good job this afternoon. Telling her what you do for her and that you love her, without badmouthing her father (whom she loves) is probably the best thing for both of you right now. Still praying for you and her.
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Got back this afternoon from a sweet three to four days away with the girls, our first family trip. I had been to the place we stayed once (two years ago, my husband and I went), but the others had been many times. It was a traditional spring break trip for many years, before and after their mother died. This was the first time the girls had their own room, and we all enjoyed the trip.
On this end, the sun is going down on the last day of March and we still have some snow in our backyard. So that makes a full three months of snow on the ground without a break. (It was scheduled to reach 65 today, and most of the snow is gone, but not yet all. We still have two patches of it, including one that is eight or ten feet long and a foot wide.)
One good story from our trip: My husband and I were walking down the sidewalk away from our bed and breakfast. I was looking for the right spot to take a photo I wanted, and he was walking beside me with his fedora on. Across the street was a crowd of people waiting for a carriage ride, with one man in a wheelchair with a voice that carried.
The man in the wheelchair called out, “Sir!” I knew he was talking to my husband, and figured my husband knew it too, but he has had some practice ignoring salesmen trying to get our attention, and we both kept walking. He called “Sir!” a couple more times and then, “You, sir, you in the hat” and at that my husband turned to see what he wanted. “Sir, you are in a handholding zone.” Cheerfully my husband took my hand and then he looked at me mischievously and kissed me. (We heard noises of approval all around. I’m guessing that people from several blocks around were looking our way by now.) After the kiss my husband looked at the man and asked, “Do I get extra credit?” and he said, “Yes, you do.”
For the next several minutes, as we continued to walk, we heard the man call out to other couples: “Sir, you are in a handholding zone. . . . Much better!” I couldn’t help but wonder if any couples went by who weren’t really in a handholding mood, or had long since gotten out of the habit, and that humorous hint from a stranger brought them back together physically, at least for a few moments. (We do hold hands frequently, including at red lights when we’re driving.)
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That is a wonderful story, Cheryl. And good timing considering the photo today is of the kissing ducks. Poor ducks don’t have hands to hold. Glad you two love birds do. 🙂
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Cheryl, 🙂
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thunder and lightening and heavy rain, however my sheets and nightgown are still on the clothesline and getting washed again. Good thing I used lots of clothes pins!!
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Jo, God is washing your clothes! 🙂
It has gotten pretty warm here. All this going back and forth with the weather is a bit difficult.
Did you see that the book I just finished and highly recommend is free from Amazon for Kindle? It is titled, A Rooster Once Crowed.
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Thanks, Janice, I got at least 8 books from your post the night, some I already had.
I have a feeling that you all are asleep and it is not even dinnertime yet
But, I will take 49!!!!
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Got it
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